How the NRM’s Wealth Programs actuallygenerate poverty

 #POVERTICS

The prospect of every Ugandan obtaining a middle-income status is still hyperbolic. This is not pessimism. This is reality. The NRM’s Wealth Creation programs are actually producing more poverty, frustration, gloom, and apathy among farmers than what it should be producing - prosperity.

While the government has gone a long way to invest in improving and distributing high yielding seeds quality, the farmers have, in many parts of this country embraced the new improved seeds with cynicism.

Successful farming does not start and end with improved seeds. There must be a whole chain of infrastructure, including the market for the produce. This bit is where the Operation Wealth Creation has failed. Its failures have conjured up to produce exactly the opposite of what it should eradicate – poverty.

In my quiet sojourn in this country, I carried a critical view of things.  My subject was examining rural development or economies. Like many realists, and community development experts, I am interested in the rural economies for obvious reasons.

The rural Uganda is still home to 82% of our citizens and yet farming is one of the least funded sectors. To obtain a middle-income society, rural economies must be seen to be flourishing.

It is possible to see a contradiction in the government policy on agri-production. For instance, the President believes that by underfunding Agriculture and over funding Security sectors, farmers will utilize the prevailing peace and security to farm.

Farmers in this country actually have a diabolical need to what the President believes in. They need the storage facilities and markets for their produces – a steady market as such. The market should transcend Kampala - for farming to become profitable and sustainable. They need farmers’ Co-operatives so urgently, to safeguard them from the vagaries of these regional and global markets.

Take for instance, the plight of Citrus Fruit farmers in Uganda. Most of them are beneficiaries of the improved seeds movement. Fruits farmers in Uganda provide you a simple example of how this government can never get the farmer’s priorities right.

In Uganda, nearly 70% of fruits produced annually go to absolute waste. Only about 30% actually end up for commercial purposes; sold on stalls at the roadside, in the markets, blended into juice in restaurants, etc. The waste in the volume of fruits produced in a year is what should concern us excessively. Clearly, Operation Wealth Creation is blind to such a critical waste.

During the elections, the “Steady Progress” bandwagon announced that a Korean Investor would set up a fruit processing plant in Teso. Those nibbled enough jumped into the bandwagon to accept such a lie. It was a lie. A promise is a lie until it materializes.

The truth is, farmers do not need Korean or foreign investors. The Citrus fruit industry requires a self-sustaining internal or local capacity to self-sustain, a steady market, a fruit cooperative, and a processing plant, for it to boom.

Through my research, I found that a complete high quality Chinese made multi-fruit processor would cost US$250,000-450,000. This is the machine needed to process 80% of all fruits produced in Uganda.

 Given a meticulous attention, the farmers Fruit Co-operative with some help from government funding and resource development, could establish a regional fruit processing plant at a cost of no more than US$600,000, (or slightly more when adjusted to inflation). This investment would employ no more than 1000 youths, along its chain.

This amount is far much less than the money spent wastefully in promoting Dr. Specioza Kazibwe for African Union Chair – a noncritical venture to our needy economy.

Much of the dilemma in this country is the leadership. Each minute that elapses with them in power, it is a painful dis-service to farmers.  Most of their economic programs in place are increasingly reactionary, poorly thought-through, and sentimental, or politically tailored.

A simple study of the fruit industry in Kenya, and how Kenya’s packaged fruit juices have infiltrated shelves of Supermarkets in Uganda, could offer a lesson.

The Operation Wealth Creation is a recipe for generating more poverty than wealth as its’ predecessors. When farmers cannot gain profitably from the fruits, they will cut down the trees. Their investments, energy, expectations, and time will lead them back to abject poverty – a vicious cycle. I witnessed a similar problem with Cotton farmers during the AGOA milieu. Can we learn, or at the least, assume a different mindset?

END.